So a while back I stopped reading the Fantasy subreddit because most of what I was seeing were lengthy paens to The Wheel of Time (a series I never had much interest in when it was new, and was not at all moved to try out by the huge amount of badly-written women that its boosters went to great lengths to apologize for) and Malazan (seven thousand volumes that are All Things To All Requests somewhere in there, oh but you’ve gotta start from book 1 for any of it). A couple of days ago I decided to give it a chance again.
This morning I picked up the tablet and saw this lovely post asking for recommendations for “fantasy epics that avoid misogyny and rape as major parts of the story”. And, well, it was locked by the moderators due to a ton of replies recommending books that have a ton of rape in them, and people arguing over how much rape is too much rape, and… god what the fuck is wrong with the genre of “epic fantasy” that it has so much fucking rape in it?
I have once more stopped reading that subreddit.
Zero rape. That is the acceptable amount of rape.
I kinda wonder why Popular Epic Fantasy feels that rape is somewhat mandatory, judging from these results.
Gosh. o.o;;
I mean I’m not gonna kink-shame as long as you’re not out rapin’ irl, but WOW.
I did notice they had another mod come along and post a good and useful Sexual Violence in SFF Database. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hQi6C2RQvjGzjSoXU0D063fCFcz1wCHXFUe7PfEsGrk/edit#gid=0
And then, reading THAT list, it’s like… Why is there so much yes? And also Pedophilia?
Yeah, that was pretty depressing too. I think there was a note that it is very much more “here are some warnings about rapey books” than “here is the rape quotient of a ton of fantasy” but, geez.